New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Today Australian band Quivers releases the second single, "Hold You Back," from their sophomore album Golden Doubt. "Hold You Back" is a bright and bittersweet summer jam about long-distance love with a propulsive backbeat, fuzz guitar, swelling strings, and airy harmonies. The track depicts riding the edge of romance and neuroticism in its lyrics: "We would kiss close to the precipice, though it makes us feel nervous." On "Hold You Back," singer Sam Nicholson says:
"Hold You Back is a stranger one. It's got that snare beat keeping you close to the edge, and lyrically is a freakout about that dance between relationships and traveling/living overseas. The dance between two people. I wanna hold you but I don't wanna hold you back [...] I wanted it to feel like arriving at a party where you are way out of your depth and the only one not in a costume [...] We got floating strings from our friend Matt Sheers, some kind of disco-damaged melodies."
The music video for "Hold You Back" oscillates between the band performing in an unfinished industrial space and panning footage of pink and green flora--some shriveled and some in bloom--against the concrete, juxtaposing cold anxiety with the cycle of life. The band lays on a rug, staring intimately into the camera, each member singing a lyric to make the song whole.
Melbourne-via-Tasmanian four-piece Quivers first released their 2018 debut We'll Go Riding on the Hearses as hand-made cassettes. The album dealt with singer Sam Nicholson's loss of his brother in a freediving accident, and "trying to not think about that, and often coming back to ghosts, benders, water, and pissing in the snow." When demand for the album grew, it received a vinyl release and led Quivers to tour the US, film a KEXP session, and be selected by NPR
Music for both the Austin 100 SXSW preview and as a 'Slingshot' artist to watch. Their life-damaged but hopeful jangle pop has only sharpened since then, and while 2021 follow-up Golden Doubt conjures up REM or The Clean, there is a lyrical directness that sets this record apart as always its own.
Quivers need to get words on the page and sounds out to keep moving on. Both Sam and Holly have lost brothers, and so Golden Doubt is also about how we use music to process things together rather than carry them alone. The cancellation of a 21-date US tour they had slated for 2020 has left them undeterred; Quivers plans to continue being a band and get back out into the world as soon as possible.
Quivers stretched out in making Golden Doubt once they nailed foundational band recordings, adding walls of violins ("Hold You Back"), a nine-person choir to "Chinese Medicine," and a broken Farfisa organ anywhere it would fit. On the striking "Nostalgia Will Kill You," Michael Panton's guitar channels Santo & Johnny; with a fresh take on 50s group vocals, Sam, Bella, and Holly sing in wrenching stop-and-starts, "you can't go back everywhere you want to go / nostalgia will kill you."
For Quivers, having their favorite records in mind is a motivating force. Chasing the heights of bittersweet earworms suits them on glistening guitar pop like "When It Breaks" and the slower 1990s' guitar glow of "Videostores." Between albums they covered R.E.M.'s Out of Time in full for Turntable Kitchen's vinyl series, which reminded them: "You can't forget guitars. Two guitars, a bass, drums and whatever voices are about will always be a good sound to get tangled up in."
Of the title, Sam says: "Golden, because musically we daydream with the guitars of Teenage
Fanclub and The Cure, the singing of The Roches' sisters, the basslines of Another Sunny Day, and the drums of Lower Dens or Car Seat Headrest. Golden Doubt, because hitting your thirties after losing people knocks you off balance for a while, but no longer caring what the world thinks is always a breakthrough feeling." Quivers may have created the antidote to existential dread by embedding it in songs that feel so present and alive. We might not find firm ground, but there's bliss in swinging from hook to hook as they sing "we stayed out 'til there was glitter in our lungs." Sooner or later you wake up and the doubt has long gone.
